DevOps as a service (DaaS) is an innovative system that can benefit almost any business that deals with software. By outsourcing DevOps, a firm moves away from traditional inhouse teams and transports their software development and IT operations teams to the cloud. Here, both departments benefit from many automated processes made possible thanks to virtual development tools.
As more businesses implement DevOps as a service and migrate their apps to the cloud, the tools which play important parts in the building, testing and deploying processes follow suit. This makes the entire process a managed cloud service.
To help you decide if this agile business strategy is right for your business, we’ll take a look at what DaaS is, as well as the advantages and disadvantages that come with it.
What is DevOps as a service?
DevOps as a service is a collection of processes, tools and automations that makes it easier for a firm’s software development team to communicate and collaborate with the firm’s IT operations team. Headed up by a DevOps engineer, the DevOps team concentrates on breaking down silos between the two teams to create more agile work processes from concept to production.
What is the main goal of DevOps as a service?
The overall aim of a DevOps team is to create an uninterrupted relationship between development and IT. This strategy allows organizations to build and release frequent updates for their products, fixing problems as soon as they’ve been identified. The feedback to the developer group not only helps the firm improve their products, but it creates a better user experience, too.
Using DevOps as a service successfully requires advanced tools that help ease the major cultural transition and implementation of a flexible API-driven infrastructure that will follow.
The main goals of the DevOps engineer include:
- Project management
- Creating and improving the IT infrastructure
- Testing and measuring performance
- Automation
- Enhancing release cycles
- Monitoring and reporting
- Security
This helps the firm achieve its goals and stay on track to hit its targets in order to deliver improved business value. DevOps key performance indicators (KPIs) help monitor the appropriate metrics and guarantee that applications attain their peak potential.
What are the pros and cons of DevOps as a service?
Pro: DevOps outsourcing is more cost effective
Using a third party to manage DevOps is much more affordable than hiring an inhouse DevOps team or training current staff with the right skills.
Pro: Easy access to expert DevOps engineers
Hiring an expert DevOps engineer with the right skills, knowledge and experience takes a lot of time. Training one takes even longer. By outsourcing DevOps as a service, you gain immediate access to expertise.
Pro: Faster testing and deployment
When development tools are stored in the cloud, users can collaborate whenever and wherever they need to. This results in faster testing and deployment.
Pro: Simplified workflow
Individual team members can concentrate on their tools without being required to understand how the complete toolchain works.
Pro: Improved quality control
By using cloud services, DevOps becomes more data-driven and the whole team collaborates on the same data set. This culminates in improved documentation and quality control.
Con: Security
Using cloud-based DaaS has the potential to create security risks. However, this can be mitigated by hiring a team through a reliable MSP.
Con: Some expertise needed
You need to have a high understanding of software development, integration, architecture and operation workflow to be able to outsource a DevOps infrastructure. If you don’t have this knowledge, you’ll need to hire experts or outsource them.
Is outsourcing DevOps right for you?
If you want to improve team collaboration, have genuine experts working on your project and deploy updates faster than ever before, implementing DevOps as a service is an excellent move for your business. Outsourcing DevOps will help your organization benefit from DevOps engineering expertise without disturbing your existing architecture. As with anything, there are a few disadvantages of DaaS, but some basic planning can help you overcome them.